Bot Framework presentations at Build 2017

In case you weren’t able to attend this year’s Microsoft Build conference, we’ve put together a list of all of the Bot Framework presentations from Microsoft Build 2017 here in this post. We’re deeply proud of all of the new features and changes we’ve made to the Bot Framework, and also confident that we will continue to make it easier to develop highly interactive Bots.

Introducing Adaptive Cards – What do bots, Windows, and a bunch of apps have in common? They all showcase data from a wide range of developers in a rich card interface. Come learn how Adaptive Cards makes this integration effortless by formalizing the boundary between card authors and experience owners.

Demos

Creating FAQ bots with QnA Maker – The best bot is the one that meets the user’s needs, and sometimes that’s just the ability to answer some basic questions. Learn how to quickly create a bot with QnA Maker, a Microsoft Cognitive Service, with just a few lines of code, and enable your knowledge workers to update the knowledge base.

Cortana skills development: Get started – For a developer new to the Cortana Skills Kit, this session walks you step-by-step to create Cortana skill. It covers the basics of designing, creating, testing, and publishing a Cortana skill from scratch using the Microsoft Bot Framework.

Build a great bot for your Microsoft Teams app – Learn how to build a great bot for Microsoft Teams. These bots let users interact with your service through conversations in Teams. With the Microsoft Teams Developer Platform, you can make your service available to users within Teams in contexts that make sense. The Teams developer platform makes it easy for you to integrate your own service, whether you develop custom apps for your team or SaaS applications for teams around the world.

Bot Conversation and speech for apps – The same bot that you create as a Cortana skill or a Skype bot can be accessed from applications. Learn how to access the bot’s intelligence in the cloud with voice, text, and UI input and create rich a conversation experience for apps.

Bot Analytics Dashboard – Why we needed to build an OSS dashboard displaying advanced analytics for Microsoft Bot Framework and how we did it.

Bot Concepts

Bot capabilities, patterns and principles – Bots have become a huge buzzword, but how are people actually using bots? What scenarios are businesses focusing on? This session dives into the handful of bot capabilities, patterns, and principles that we see our partners focusing on.

Dialog management in Bot Framework – One of the most important skills every bot developer needs is the ability to work with the dialog stack for a seamless conversation and experience for the user. The Node.JS Bot Framework SDK has powerful tools to enable your bot to transition from one dialog to the next, ensuring the correct dialog is executed for user requests. This session covers several strategies for working with dialogs in complex bots.

Bot Human Handoff – Bots can’t replace our human agents, but they can augment the customer service experience. This session explores how we can use a bot to initiate a conversation with a customer, and then hand off context to a human agent.

Designing conversational UI for bots (and humans) – The Bot Framework enables you to quickly build and publish a bot to engage with users on many of the popular messaging services like Skype, Microsoft Teams, Facebook Messenger, and Slack. But to many designers and developers, designing an “app” UI as a conversation in a messaging windows is a new and daunting prospect. In this session, you’ll learn how to design a conversational UI that feels as fast, as fluid, and as natural as a messaging conversation between friends, while driving user engagement for your bot.

Cloud4Good: Building an inclusive chat bot for athletes with disabilities – In February 2017, Microsoft Canada partnered with viaSport British Columbia to build an inclusive chat bot for athletes with disabilities. In this session, we demo how the Microsoft Bot Framework and Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs were used to build a bot to streamline access to highly relevant resources for people in the inclusive sporting community; improve the tone in conversations around disabilities by correcting offensive and outdated terminology; and provide viaSport with a richer way to understand and serve this community.

Advanced LUIS models and enabling rich query support in bots and Cortana skills – Gigseekr is a new live music discovery service committed to helping you find and stay up to date with events. Gigseekr talks about how they have built their solutions around the Microsoft Bot Framework, Azure Search, and now Cortana skills, and in particular about advanced application of co-operating LUIS.ai models to handle a wide variety of natural language queries.

You can check out anything you missed or want to learn more about from Microsoft Build 2017 here.